Right to Bear Thoughts, No. 001
He's the One Who Likes All Our Pretty Songs.
Our Evening Began in Peter Sichel’s Comfortable Study
…in his New York townhouse, where the candlelight was just right, the hi-fi was in the background and the wine was delicious…
“What’s the secret, Peter?”
“Naturally, I’ll say it’s the wine.”
“Mmmm, it does go well with the chicken!”
“Delicious again, Peter.”
Turn It Up
“Turn is up… cough …dude, where did you get this? It’s clean. A bit minty, too. Feels fresh on the throat.”
“The new dispensary down the street. Much closer than the old one. And now I can walk to grab carts.”
“How’s the selection? What other live rosins do they have?”
“Man, so many more. I hadn’t tried Tactical Turntable until tonight. Definitely getting it again.”
“That’s so friggin’ cool. About time, I can’t stand the idea of having butane remnants—or even a hint of remnants. Shit, even knowing it’s a solvent-extracted concentrate. Sorry… went off on a tangent there. Here.”
“No worries… but, yeah, stuff from the 70s in no way compares to the 20s. Will of the people, eh? We vote for what we want.”
“Real weed for my real friends, and opossums in a onesie for oppressors.”
“That’s… specific… XKCD 1645?”
“XKCD 1645.”
“So…
…
cough
…
…so Generation X, I just finished it last week. And shit, we’re stuck in between the cultural themes of the generation and ours that is ‘killing’ whatever the industry of the day is.”
“Xennial?”
“Woah, I’ve never heard that before…”
“XKCD 1053”
“XKCD 1053. So, yeah… xennials. My favorite things were Coupland’s margin notes. So easy to identify with. Here.”
“Hmm…
…
cough
…
…like what?”
“Hand me my notebook… here we are: ‘now denial.’ It means we tell ourselves the only time worth living in is the past, and the only time that may ever be interesting again is the future…
…here’s another, you’ll love this one: ‘obscurism.’ Peppering daily life with obscure references… like pop culture junk… as a subliminal means to showcase education and wish to disassociate from mass culture.
Now this one… this dissociation thing, it’s me… if I add a detail: mass culture of consumerism.”
“Education though? You’re not like that.”
“I try, it’s just so many people have told me I’m a ‘one-upper.’ I try so hard not to be… it’s just… that I know a little bit about a lot. Barely anything about a lot, really, and useless for me. But enough to show genuine interest in conversations.”
“C:\DOS”
“C:\DOS\RUN”
“C:\RUN\DOS\RUN”
“Yup, exactly like that.”
“I hear ya… ah, music stopped. What next?”
“Wish you were here?”
“Crazy… I just got the original pressing from Discogs a few weeks ago.”
…
…
…
“There’s also the way his characters tell stories in the book. It read it as one of their favorite things to do, even though it seems all of ‘em know half the stories anyway. To me, it’s what’s happening during the stories… I mean, not like plot stuff that leads into the stories… it’s the experience of telling an already-known story: that’s the enjoyment. It just makes their storytelling so interesting. It’s almost like…
…
cough
…
…almost like I’m all three characters blended together, and I’m just sitting… and thinking instead of reading.”
“I got one.”
“Huh?”
“A story.”
“What about… wait, that’s not the point. Wanna tell it?”
“Hell, yeah. You gotta play along though… you will know it. I’ve been workin’ a pretty crappy discrimination case. It’s caused me to spin so some older music. Music decades and decades old that’s been griping about this crap forever. Tell me what you think—if it’s Coupland-y enough for you.”
“It’s the experience, so it will be. I want to remember this. Lemmie grab a pen.”
“Okay. Here’s what I want to do. I’m gunna… cough… gunna describe a guy, and I want you to write a song.”
“Write…?”
“Don’t worry, you’ll know it right away.”
“Is it… old?”
“Welp, to us? No. To everyone after. Absolutely. Don’t worry… no judgement, this isn’t some sort of test.”
“Silicate chemistry is second nature to us geochem…”
“XKCD 2501.”
“XKCD 2501. Okay, here we go…
A man is born into an unjust world. Most are blind, he sees true. He is who he is, which is nothing to be ashamed of. Oppressors seek to purposely engrain survivorship bias in the masses… and they… err… they seek to place the burden of countering their bigotry and hate upon those who are oppressed. Umm… like, you know, ‘why are there so many? They weren’t around when I was younger; it must be a choice; it’s unnatural; it wasn’t like this in my time; think of the children; blah blah…’ This man knew that, since the beginning of time and humanity itself, we’ve all existed together, labels or not… Okay, go!”
What else should I be?
All apologies
What else should I say?
Everyone is gay
“See, I knew you’d get it right away.”
“I’ve never heard it put that way. And fuck, man—it’s not that  old.”
“Over 30 years now. Okay, continuing…
Although he fights for justice, he’s the Sisyphus of privilege. Genuine advocacy for the oppressed mistaken for farcical contempt by the very individuals he seeks to elevate. There is no black and white, no absolutes, when it comes to who can, should, and will stand up. If so, that perpetuates the very scheme of oppression itself. Why should a man, who only looks  like an oppressor, not be accepted as an advocate for the oppressed?”
What else could I write?
I don’t have the right
What else should I be?
All apologies
“Stealing from Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip now, with a bit of my own sprinkled in: a lot of the good was corrupted when organized religion got into full swing. Teachings taken out of context to meet the agendas of others… religion became a tool for the weak to control the strong… with all these new morals and ethics, survival of the fittest was gone. Arbitrary rules where damnation was the price if certain rules were not followed.”
In the sun, in the sun, I feel as one
In the sun, in the sun
Married, buried
He sometimes dreamt of having no conscience, sometimes wished he just fell in line with the rest. But he, like the oppressed, can’t. Gibberish, a multi-generational game of telephone where…”
“Can I try this one?”
“Hell yeah.”
“…where nomadic tribesmen shouting metaphors into a desert wind, which were then intercepted by Greek-speaking bureaucrats who formatted the ‘divine’ into a standardized Greek font, so the Roman Empire could finally have a centralized operating system that wasn’t a mess of competing pagan apps, but even that wasn’t enough because the product remained in Latin—the ultimate proprietary software—until a German monk hacked the source code and leaked it to the public. It’s just a translation of a translation of a rumor that isn’t the ‘word,’ but a collection of leverage points optimized for 17th-century social control where every ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ is actually a sophisticated piece of spyware meant to install a sense of permanent guilt in the user so that they’d keep paying their subscriptions to the local franchise of the church, which is really just the HR department, so any contrarian view is what gets blamed for societal woes. Gibberish.”
“Did you even breathe, jesus christ…”
“Nope.”
“You still have to come up with the lyrics.”
I wish I was like you
Easily amused
Find my nest of salt
Everything’s my fault
“Back to me now?”
“Over do it, and have a fit.”
“Continuing the gibberish… our man…”
“Just say Kurt.”
“Kurt didn’t give a shit. In fact, it’s the very hypocrisy he fought to expose. He didn’t care what some non-existent invisible being thought of him, and would gladly accept the judgment of those who claim to speak for it, because no matter what he did, he’d be judged by religion, with all her gibberish-based pearl-clutching, which justifies past-and-continuing murder-for-blasphemy / murder-for-heresy.”
I’ll take all the blame
Aqua sea foam shame
Sunburn, freezer burn
Chocking on the ashes of her enemy
“The simple reasoning? We’re all human, we all have the right to rewrite this being’s ‘word’ as we see fit.
Henry VIII realized that if the English didn’t authorize their own ‘official’ version they couldn’t justify a divorce based on a creative reading of Leviticus, so the whole thing stopped being about a conversation with the infinite, and became a bespoke legal brief written in the blood of anyone who dared to point out that the king’s ‘new testament’ was just an expensive way to legitimize his own search for a male heir.
A glorified prenup written in a font that suggests ancient authority, but whose ink was barely dry before it was being used to justify the seizure of monastic assets and the liquidation of any theological competitor who didn’t understand that the new distribution center for god was now located in the king’s bedroom.
For these folks, morality is a convenience, relied on only when it fits the narrative.
Nothing says ‘god’s plan’ quite like a structural edit that allows the head of the church to execute his ex-wives without losing the mandate of heaven while his HR department leveraged this ‘hell’ as the ultimate non-compete clause to ensure no one ever tried to find a better deal in the afterlife… or the current one.”
In the sun, in the sun, I feel as one
In the sun, in the sun
Married
Married
Married
Buried
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah
“We’re all god-damn-fucking animals anyway. Why can’t we just coexist as ourselves? There is no room for hate.”
“XKCD 37.”
“XKCD 37.”
All in all is all we are
“Dude, you remember the time we first heard Nevermind’s secret song?”
“Scared the shit out of us.”
“Yup.”